A few days ago, as I was checking-out at a grocery store, the employee who had just rung me up said ‘Happy Holidays’. The statement was sincere, it was not meant in mockery, and I could tell that the employee was having a good day. But before I could thank him, someone standing behind me shouted, ‘You mean ‘Merry Christmas’, right?’ At this point I was in shock over the nerve of this person and the employee became defensive. I shook my head at the customer behind me and simply walked away. I wasn’t about to get involved in a debate at the check-out line.

My story above is becoming a common one. But there is more happening here than simply the interjections of a rude person. In that ten seconds of dialogue, something is lost that is really the tragedy of this whole ‘war on Christmas’ that FOX News has so eagerly forced upon the public. The loss is the loss of sincerity. That employee wasn’t trying to insult me, or start a debate, or infuse secularism into our culture. That employee wasn’t trying to offend the rude person behind me in line. The employee was only trying to be courteous. They didn’t know me from Adam and, rather than making the assumption that I’m a Christian, he went with the generic ‘Happy Holidays’. And by that, as a sane human being, I was able to recognize that he meant he hoped that I had a joyous celebration of whatever holiday I practice.

But as a result of this ridiculous ‘war on Christmas’ nonsense, that employee was castrated by someone behind me; someone he had to now check-out. Unlike me, who can walk away, he had to stay there and listen to that person rant about how the secular agendas of the socialist government are stripping away the rights of Christians, blah blah blah. And as a result of that, that employee may be hesitant to wish anyone a Happy Holidays, or a Merry Christmas, or a Happy Hanukkah, for fear of being chastised for it. All sincerity he had, all the joy he had, stripped from him because some jerk who follows Glenn Beck on Facebook couldn’t mind his own business.

There is another side to this story, though. Because since that event, every time someone wishes me a Merry Christmas, I get a twitch. Are they being sincere or just nudging me to say something back, just to get a rise out of me, or to start a debate. Are they being serious? Sarcastic? Cynical? I can’t tell anymore. My ‘sincerity meter’ is broken. And that is a real shame. I love this time of year. I love the idea of the holiday season. I like the ideal Dickens Christmas. It doesn’t have to be religious for me; it certainly wasn’t religious for Dickens.

This season is supposed to be about charity, and good works, and family fun, and feeling new and whole again with the start of a new year just around the corner. Instead I’m pulling the hood over my head and shadowing myself from season’s greetings because I am afraid to get into a polemical battle of rhetoric over the ‘reason for the season’. I have to drive behind people with ‘Keep Christ in Christmas’ bumper stickers, most of whom have no idea how ludicrous those stickers are really. I doubt I am the only one disenchanted this year.

The irony of it all is that secularism isn’t trying to take Christmas away; it was secularism that gave us Christmas, the way we celebrate it today, in the first place. When the Puritans came to this continent, they outlawed the celebration of Christmas. They didn’t come here for religious freedom. Religious freedom implies that they came here to start a colony where other religions could practice peacefully. No, they kicked you out if you practiced any other religion other than their own. The first place in this country that celebrated ‘religious freedom’ was the colony of Rhode Island (originally Providence) when its founder was kicked out of the Massachusetts Bay colony because he had different religious views. It was also the first colony to renounce the British during the Revolutionary War period.

Christmas was not a part of American culture. Protestants didn’t really celebrate it–certainly not the Puritans and Quakers, but Catholics did and Catholics were not the most beloved citizens of the time. It was not until the Victorian period, until Dickens and Irving idealized Christmas, that it became fashionable to celebrate. And even still, it was not made a legal holiday until after the American Civil War. And in a large sense, Christmas was secularized so that protestants could also celebrate it; it was no longer just a Catholic religious celebration but a celebration that became, truly, a universal holiday. For coverage, I direct your attention to Jon Stewart:

In one part of the segment Stewart trusted the History Channel and as a result suffered a pants on fire rating from Politifact (whoops!), proving one again that the History Channel does not live up to its name and, frankly, is untrustworthy (though lay people will continue to trust it, regardless). Despite this, Stewart is correct about almost everything else. And he makes his case quite well, even with his one incorrect statement about legislative branch.

Though I would like to make it clear I am not ‘against Christmas’. In fact I think ‘Merry Christmas’ has a place in the season, just as does ‘Happy Holidays’ or ‘Seasons Greetings’. I have a post on it here:

I am greatly concerned this time of year for the sincerity that has been a part of this season since the late 19th century. If we don’t act towards preserving it, it will be lost to us. It will become a cynical season, one where nobody trusts anybody and everyone is more concerned about the polemics of the debate than about giving to each other regardless of religious, social, or cultural backgrounds. It is upsetting to think that this part of the season is doomed. But if certain people have their way, we can kiss the joy of this season goodbye.

In the world of myths, there are gods and there are men, and by myth here, I mean beings that far exceed the standards of normalcy. Of course, on the former Christopher Hitchens had strong opinions which, I’m sure, are not lost on any of my readers. But rest assured, if a man could achieve the heights of immortality, while also having a strong opinion about it, Christopher Hitchens was that man.

Enough will be said about his accomplishments, which were extraordinary, and of his controversial views, which were numerous. So I’ll leave those duties for the media. In this post, I’d like to only touch upon my deep grief at his passing and the few moments where my life and his life intersected, and the impression he left on me.

A few years ago, when I was still young and foolish, I had the pleasure of meeting Hitchens. At the time, I was a part of a radio show and we asked him, among others, to sit down with us for a personal interview. Hitchens happily obliged. Unfortunately I missed part of that interview, but he more than made up for it when we ran into each other later in the hotel bar (it was at a conference).

He had dropped something on the ground, a notepad, so I picked it up and walked it over to him. He made a funny quip about the interview being far too short and then shared a drink with me for a few more minutes until his cab came. We had a few laughs, shared some insightful thoughts about the state of the world, and then he was gone.

At another point (I cannot recall for the life of me if it was before or after) we had another long interview with Hitchens. Every time we spoke to him, we came away feeling as though we had just engaged life in a new way; we were re-energized, motivated. He had that sort of personality, at least that was how we knew him.

I was devastated when I found out he had cancer. When I read this evening that he had passed away, I had to fight back tears. It isn’t even that I agree with Hitchens; I enjoyed reading his words, I enjoyed talking to him, but I can’t really say I fully supported his opinions on most subjects. And isn’t it something that I should be so affected by the passing of a man I shared a drink with at a conference but once? Telling, I’d like to think, of the sort of human being that Hitchens had been. That he could reach across ideological boundaries, that he could communicate to people who completely disagreed with him–Christians, Muslims, even Democrats–in such a way that people still loved him.

I will surely miss Christopher Hitchens. The world will be much more dull without his personality. Please read Vanity Fair’s piece on him.

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The Self-Concept is a fickle thing. It starts to develop young, and as we get a little older, grow more aware of its influences, we try to wrangle it into submission. At one point, just when we think we have it subdued, it gets loose and, it is in those brief moments of panic, we hope that nobody had a camera rolling.

Many of my readers know I have been reticent to discuss matters of god; while I voice my opinion about a particular interpretation or an eisegetical understanding of the figure ‘god’, I often avoid the debate over the deity’s existence all together. There are several reasons for this reticence and, perhaps for the first time in a long time, I’d like to break my silence on the issue. But fair warning, once I finish writing this post, I suspect I shall put to rest any further comment about the subject for a while more.

If I’m going to be blunt about it, I find the whole ‘does god exist’ question to be a boring one. To be fair, it wasn’t always some banal subject for me. At an all-too-recent point in my life, the question played a large role in defining my self-concept. I lived by it, and I had lots of questions; I just thought I had more answers. I won’t say I was a fundamentalist about it, but I had grown dogmatic. I lived by a set of precepts, and by ‘lived’ I mean I was ‘blinded’ by them. Perhaps that isn’t entirely fair either. My anger, my frustration–a direct result of the question of the existence of a god–blinded me from the destructive influences these precepts had on my life.

At one point I ceased trying to talk to people who did not agree with me. The fabric of the fictional weave, or mythos, I had woven about anyone with even a modicum of faith kept me at a distance. And when I ventured close, it was only to ridicule them, or debate them, and usually this only happened on my own turf. And I wasn’t alone. The sectarianism of the movement fueled me, kept me charged, able to proceed in my own grandiose delusions about the devaluation of belief. It was pathetic. I was pathetic.

But something happened. I don’t know what it is. It was not stress, though some of my former ‘colleagues’ (I just don’t know what to call them) might argue that it was. Frankly, I have never been able to put a finger on the variable that snapped me from my meaningless, selfish existence. A lot was crashing down at that point, and among the debris I started to see the shattered pieces of the life I had been living scattered before me. It was as if I had taken part in some archaeological dig and came across fragments with my image on them, and while I saw my face clearly in the shards I could not recognize the person I was seeing. It was something from which I wanted to distance myself.

I struggled with this at first, tried to recall at what point my life had taken this awkward turn towards the path on which I had only just realized I had been treading. But the only real memory I could find was the one that had kept all that aggression. It was at that point then that I decided that whatever it was that had driven me towards this question had become irrelevant. While I could easily recount the moment I left my faith in the Christian god behind, I could no longer find the emotion that I had, at that point in my life, useful; not nearly as useful as any of the questions that had begun to take its place.

I can easily understand, even appreciate, the confusion that followed (and, apparently, is still prevalent) when I left the movement behind. But whoever I was then, I’m not now. It is unfortunate that the Inter Highway does not have a time-concept. That is to say, only a handful of the people who knew me then will read this now. And more people will come across those words I wrote years ago and will be unable to separate that dead individual from the man I currently am (and from the one I will become). It is disheartening, in a way, and hopefully they will forget the name of that person as quickly as they happened upon it. But if they search me out, it is for them that I write this post.

For those who I left behind in my journey, I have no words of comfort for you. I suspect that you are either filled with disgust, with acceptance, or are just noncommittal. Maybe you’re working up a response. Of course I welcome any discussion. But it might be important now to note that I have not even yet ventured at an answer to the question ‘does god exist?’ I have refused to answer. I do not wish to indulge your egotism, your wish to label me, to place me in some convoluted category. To hell with that. If you want to judge me, do so on my positions in other more serious matters. Do not trouble me with your bothersome rantings about the pointlessness or the value in the exultation of faith.

If you feel the urge to tell the world your position on the matter, I pity you. The question over the existence of god has ceased to be an intellectual pursuit in this radicalized society and has, instead, become one drawn-out session of incontinence after another (and I’m being polite about it). If you, adventurous reader, enjoy those sorts of discussions, of what I can only view as a form of masochism or the results of some type of virulent piety, then by all means, don’t let me stop you. Just leave me out of it.

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Indiana Jones, take a back seat! Look what we have here! No, not a crystal skull or the lost city of Atlantis (again), but this!

Giorgio Tsoukalos argued in his latest issue of the estimable, peer-reviewed academic journal Legendary Times that this is certainly evidence that David was working with ancient aliens to build the Temple. He stated, “What other conclusion can we draw from this? It is sooooo (sic!) obvious t hat these are ancient alien glyphs of some sort, which only means that the Exodus account wasn’t really about the Egyptians at all! The Hebrews were escaping enslavement in the mines under Jerusalem from the aliens! This must mean they were using the Israelites to mine ore for their ships! Only a blind idiot could miss this connection!”

David Elkington and Wayne Herschel were both able to be reached for comment. Herschel merely stated that this was just more evidence that the lead codices were secret alien passports. Elkington reiterated that Peter Thonemann was only a Greek scholar and didn’t know what he was talking about, which apparently baffled journalists who had only asked him his thoughts on the new discovery.

The greatest Biblical scholar of the world, Hershel Shanks, noted that he would be publishing a special issue of BAR (also the greatest academic archaeology journal of all time, beating out its main competition from ASOR) to show how this was (a) not a forgery, (b) Golan is innocent, (c) that Bill Dever was right all along, and (d) to dedicate even more space to evangelical advertising campaigns.

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Joel and I have a love of mimetics, so we obviously will write on memes whenever we can. But we sometimes have different views on how they play a role in ancient literature (specifically early Christian literature). In response to my recent blog post on memes and the death of ‘history’ and ‘fiction’, Joel has some good points, and I would like address both the good and the bad below.

Tom makes some good points, but as usual, I think he goes too far. First, the Gospels were written long after Paul who were fighting other leading voices at the time, proclaiming Jesus.

This is, of course, true. My point is that Paul converted into something. Some sectarian Jewish tradition existed of which Paul became a part; what that tradition looked like before Paul we cannot say with any certainty. We hope it looked similar to what Paul wrote about, but we have no other witness to this sectarian tradition outside of Paul and some of what exists in Paul’s letters, we know were later interpolations (like the verse where Paul tells women to be silent in churches, for example–something Paul probably didn’t write). But one thing is certain, some of what Paul wrote about were memes. He might not have called them memes but he pulls on common archetypical figures and motifs (the two metaphorical women, Abraham, Moses, the several divisions of heaven, the breaking of the bread and sharing of the wine as body and blood, the use of mystic/secret language like τελειος, and so on) in his letters in which he wraps around a singular idea: salvation (in itself a common sectarian meme of the time). The Gospels were written after Paul, yes, but they were written quite possibly with Paul in mind (possibly Mark himself had copies of some of Paul’s letters; Luke certainly did).

Okay, so I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this, but let me point out that Judith is based on Yael. Tobit, well… There is a difference between Aesop’s Fables and Josephus’ Wars of the Jews.

Apples and oranges. Both use memes in different ways and Josephus goes ahead and fabricates narratives from scratch to suit his agendas as well. Like Alexander’s march on Jerusalem, for example. There are people, whole people, Josephus just fabricates for the sake of it. Some even argue the Essenes were ideological fabrications by Josephus on what the ‘perfect Jewish sect’ should look like. Judith is still fiction, whether based on Yael or not. Wonder Woman might be based on a woman the creator of the comic knew in real life; that doesn’t make the story any more fact-based than what it is.

Tobit would fall into the former, but the Gospels into neither, although baring marks of both.

I wonder how one could claim the Gospels were in any way similar to Josephus. With the one exception being the fabrication of events, there is simply no comparison. I would love to see Joel argue compellingly for a genre comparison between the two forms.

But I still believe Joel is missing the point. It is about memes here, and every narrative I list, whether history or fiction, is full of memes that destroy history by selling fiction.

Enoch was written in an apocalyptic style and used a figure from Scripture to give it authority.

And is full of memes like apocalyptic revelations, ascension narratives, angels, and so on. Even the style (apocalyptic) is a meme! Fascinating stuff, mimetics.

It doesn’t posit a new faith but reports an old prophecy which was to the community it was addressing. I’m not sure that one could stretch those three books and collections of writings to the study of the Historical Jesus and come to the conclusion that Tom seems to be suggesting.

I’m not sure what is that conclusion you think I’m suggesting!

Another point is that the Gospels, as I noted, were written long after Paul was preaching Jesus and using the Historical Jesus (his, not Tom Wright’s) to base his own ministry off of.

Interesting. What ministry is it that Paul cites in his letters? I know of not a single instance where Jesus’ ministry is ever mentioned.

One would have to insist that Paul alone was making up the story of Jesus, and thereby creating a new tradition which was met with others doing the same but not the same.

Absolutely not. I don’t know how you drew that conclusion from what I wrote.

If Acts is historical in any way, then Paul was very close to the Historical Jesus.

Alas, Acts is far from historical. This is quite easily demonstrated.

In other words, one must insist that the Jesus mythos developed differently, over different geographical locations, at nearly the same time which would then lead to other questions which are completely implausible.

The mythos of Jesus, assuming you mean the death, resurrection, and ascension, had developed over different geographical locations over time. But Joel, we are talking about memes here. Memes. Nothing then generates ex nihilo. The Gospel authorsmight never have heard of Innana, who was crucified naked (humiliated), died, and resurrected to new glory. But they probably knew of other resurrection stories like Romulus. Or other figures who died and resurrected like Orpheus. Or even if they were simply fans of Jewish literature, completely isolated from pagan influences, they would know of ascension narratives like those of Moses, Enoch, and Elijah.

When you say ‘mythos of Jesus’ remember what it is you’re talking about. You’re talking about a literary collection of motifs, archetypes, and tropes: memes. That is what I’m talking about, at least. We can quibble over the human Jesus, but first you have to find him in between those memes, somewhere, if he can ever be found–if such a figure ever existed.

Further, I would encourage Tom to look at just how long it would have taken a story to take root. McCasland (1935, I think?) suggests no more than 5 years in the ancient world, citing the legends which grew up around Vespasian. Taking Vespasian as an example, Josephus was writing within just a few years of the actual event and was able to greatly expand the legends of the Emperor who defeated the Jews. Yet, it only worked because it was based on a real person.

A new study is presented, arguing for a faster exchange of data than that, by K.L. Noll in my forthcoming collection of essays with Thompson. But it is an irrelevant position anyway; in whisper-down-the-alley, memes can change in seconds when people are right next to each other. That is the struggle with memes. And the struggle with oral history, and the struggle with literature.

Let me put it to you like this. You stage a picture in your backyard, using models, wearing the clothes you like, playing a sport of some sort that you really enjoy (let’s say soccer, since I love soccer). Is that a picture of the socio-cultural landscape of today? Of course it isn’t. It’s an image of what some might believe to be an ideal socio-cultural landscape. It might contain some historically significant information. Maybe it contains a street sign in the background, maybe there is a tag showing on a piece of clothing, maybe the soccer ball has a team logo on it. But is that picture going to be worth something? Maybe, but not really.

Now let’s put this another way (more relevant to the Gospel authors). Let’s say I watch an episode of That 70’s Show. I go out, grab some clothing I think best resembles clothing from the 70’s, and I get some people together who I think look like they could be from that era, and then I dress them up and have a photo shoot. Could I then take that to a historian of that period and claim that the image is a historical witness to the historical 70’s? Absolutely not. The best I could argue is that it is a representation of what I think the 70’s were like, based on solely my understanding of a single episode of That 70’s Show. That is mimetics at work.

That is the Gospel narratives in a nutshell. It is a Gospel author, drawing from various memes, creating a scene or image (through literary means) which expresses his particular understanding of the time, through his theological lens (whichever one that might have been), and claiming it to be a historical witness to a figure. In truth, and at best, all the Gospels amount to are representations of the figure of Jesus. And whatever historical information they contain can be collected into a single paragraph (mainly Herod, Pilate, Jerusalem, Bethany, Caesar, the Pax Romana, the Temple; in other words–the historical value is the background–the setting–of the narrative). Memes drove the creation of the Gospel.

That doesn’t mean there wasn’t a historical figure at the onset, but it does make finding or locating that figure even more difficult. And it is possible that such a figure never existed at all, given the state of how mimetics works. That doesn’t mean I am saying he didn’t exist. Only that the possibility is there.

Also, this notion that we can use the Gospels to discover the Historical Jesus, I am becoming convinced, is a misplaced avenue of academic pursuit.

Then we have no disagreements. I wonder Joel if you’re not talking past me here? ;-)

Joel has more useful things to say that I did not engage. Go there and read it!

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The title of this post may be a little tongue-in-cheek. But the truth is, memes can carry a fictional story to the point where people believe they are true. The best example ever came over my Facebook wall not too long ago and I had to share it, if only to make a point I’ve been trying to make for ages. This video was posted by a friend of mine:

The video is replicated by several users on Youtube, none make clear where these events are taking place. Many believe this video is a clip of a real event. And that, if anything, is a testament to the acting and believability of the comedy show Reno 911. This DUI win is from an episode on that program. It was written, produced, and directed for entertainment, it was manufactured to gain ratings, and never was it meant to be taken seriously (that is to say, it was not meant to be taken as a true, historical event). But with the power of memes, this all changed.

In our age of digital technology, we tend to believe we can spot a fake and are more critical of the things we watch, read, or hear. It could, after all, be a fabrication by an amateur graphics artist, or a graphics animator, or something else. But even with all of our cynicism and skepticism, many people fall for even the most obvious fictions. A simple Google search would reveal that this video was taken from Reno 911. But so many people believed the event had happened, they wrote Snopes.com about it, who then published this page showing its origins in 2005. Yet the video is still reposted as a true event today.

This should cause every historian to pause; when examining the function of memes in our culture, in our modern day, we have to be cautious. But in a world, such as the ancient world, where beliefs in fanciful things are normal, where skepticism wasn’t as common, and where fact-checking was all but irrelevant (or nonexistent), what might that say about the information we have? What are the implications towards ancient literature, then? This, of course, has implications on the historical Jesus.

If a figure hadn’t existed in antiquity, and the Gospels were written as fictitious edification or as theological narratives (like Tobit, 1 Enoch, or Judith for example), is it possible or even probable that a small sectarian group might have taken them to be fact? And given the speed at which word spreads in antiquity, the amount of time it took to travel, the cross-cultural boundaries that these stories passed over or through to reach their destinations, what might that tell us about the function of ‘history’ in the past? What might that tell us about the value of the New Testament as a historical collection of books about the early church?

Memes can effectively destroy both ‘fiction’ and ‘history’ at the same time by passing off fictional stories as history. They do so in our own age as often as they did in antiquity; and examples can, of course, be given to no end. We have plenty of examples, perhaps in the hundreds if not more, of this sort of thing happening all the time. A story is completely fabricated, for whatever reason (motivation is secondary to this discussion), and in a few years time, it is believed or accepted–if not wholly as true, then partially. And this is in antiquity, where information traveled at a much slower pace than at which it travels today.